Bad CallsLessons of the New Hampshire polling fiasco.

(Continued from page 2)

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Lesson: Polls sometimes reflect not what people will do, but what they should do.

8. Late deciders surprised us. CBS News' final press release said its survey showed Obama leading Clinton "on the eve of the New Hampshire primary." The Times describes this as "last-minute polling by CBS, which ended Sunday." Last-minute polling? Sunday? That's two days before the primary ended—and three days after it began, if you start counting from the Iowa earthquake. You can't shut down your phone bank 60 percent of the way through an election and expect to predict the outcome. Gallup made the same mistake, wrapping up its poll for USA Today at 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon. Three days later, shocked by the returns, Gallup editor Frank Newport marveled, "This is unusual. In most pre-election environments, voter statements of their vote intentions in the days before an election are good indicators of how they actually vote." True. But in this case, the days before the election were the election.

In the short run, the pollsters should have adjusted to the schedule. But in the long run, it's the schedule that must change. The schedule is unusual because it defies human nature. Mentally, we're not equipped to pick a president in five days. The absurd pressure generated by this timetable accounts for many of the confounding factors outlined above: the unstable preferences, the late deciders, the surprising turnout. The polls were confused because we were confused.

Lesson: An election calendar that's too fast for pollsters is too fast for voters.

9. The late deciders were defying a juggernaut. Looking back, directors of the errant Marist Poll argue, "If the pollsters and media pundits erred, it was not in their weekend numbers but in not polling Monday and missing the impact of the unrelenting media coverage that characterized the Clintons as finished." Other pollsters offer similar theories suggesting an "underdog" effect and a rejection of "pre-election coronations." But guess who drove the Obama coronation and the unrelenting talk of Clinton's doom? The same pollsters and their media clients.

In short, the pollsters screwed themselves. Their numbers were refuted on Tuesday precisely because they were published on Sunday and Monday. And this isn't a problem they can solve by tinkering with methodology or elections. There's only one sure way to avoid another backlash: by keeping their numbers quiet till the votes are in. Music to my ears.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.

Illustration by Robert Neubecker.

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